Any Means Necessary, Nottingham Playhouse, review: 'a bit PC-ploddy'

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This dramatisation of the 2010 'spycops' revelations powerfully catches the pain of personal betrayal, but too much of the writing feels sketchy and televisual

Our often ailing and flailing regional theatres can usually count on a fillip when they latch on to a story with strong local connections and important national ramifications.

As things stand, though, the Nottingham Playhouse is only on to a partial winner with Kefi Chadwick’s new play, which looks at how the activist community was infiltrated by undercover coppers. The systematic programme of subterfuge was gradually exposed in the wake of the disruption of a protest at Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, Nottinghamshire in 2009, the ensuing prosecutions and dramatic collapse of the trial.

What caused particular interest and consternation, has plainly outraged Chadwick and is current the subject of a public inquiry, is the extent to which certain “spycops” felt free to cross the line from friendship into full-blown relationships with female activists. Although this is a fictional treatment, the playwright has been in contact with, and had some support from, the eight women who took legal action against the police in 2011, resulting in compensation and apologies.

Nick Karimi as Gav and Kate Sissons as Mel in Any Means NecessaryCredit:
Robert Day

She has clearly been inspired too, if that’s the right word, by the now notorious antics of former Met officer Mark Kennedy, who – under the alias of Mark Stone, and based in Nottingham – infiltrated numerous anti-capitalist and environmental protests and had two long-term activist girlfriends, one for six years.

The pain of personal betrayal is powerfully caught at the end, when Kate Sissons’s good-natured, trusting Mel comes face to face with a man she knew as former drugs courier Dave Cross: “You made me feel so special and now I just feel stupid,” she says, withdrawn, empty, as Samuel Oatley’s chameleon police careerist (a slightly incongruous, crop-haired cockney, not a tree-hugging hippy type) squirms in his seat, quietly crushed.

For too much of the time, though, the writing feels a bit sketchy, televisual, PC-ploddy. Framing the action with testimonies from other duped women, ramming home the sense of stark injustice, the playwright brushes past the complexities that might take this drama out of our moral comfort zones: are the campaigners only harmless, to what extent does the interloper “go rogue” despite himself, and does someone taking these kinds of risks (at one point we see inarticulate Dave improvising excuses when his passport is found) have a greater sex appeal?

I hungered for more background information, greater psychological excavation. Giles Croft’s production, sporting an imposing design of raised platforms, has a due sense of occasion, but this isn’t yet a major, necessary theatrical event.